Bio Picks

In a post at the Book Bench yesterday, linking to an anecdote about J. D. Salinger by Blair Fuller at the Paris Review site, Macy Halford intriguingly advocates “a general call for first-person anecdotes about Salinger” and explains:

It has been reported that an authorized biography will probably never be allowed, and as noble an effort as an unauthorized biography may be, I think I’d prefer to hold in my hand a collection of personal remembrances like Fuller’s—each one a pearl, no digging required.

The question that this preference raises is important. As the author of a critical biography, I can attest that the oral-historical aspect of the project is crucial. I conducted hundreds of interviews, the transcripts of which would, if compiled, make for an extremely long book. There were plenty of “pearls” that got left out; and, sometimes, with anecdotes that made their way in, the participant’s storytelling voice was reduced to a key phrase or two. I wish it had been possible to get more voices into a book that’s already very long; we’re all imbued with the voices of the people we know, and this is as true for an artist as for anyone else.

But a biography—and, indeed, a life—is made of so many more elements than the anecdotes that familiars can recount. In the life of an artist, there is the documentary record (papers and letters, as well as work documents that are in archives, libraries, and private hands). There’s the public record—whether reviews, interviews, or news—which traces the course of an artist through the times and often, in its time, provokes significant responses from an artist, and even alters his path. And there is, of course, and above all, the artist’s work, of which a biography of the artist—if it’s any good at all—will foster a new appreciation and understanding.

Biography is analytical in terms of the practical skills it requires, but it’s literary in terms of the insights into character, brought to life in language, that it demands. And it’s precisely in the essentially literary composition of character, the psychological insight that distinguishes biography from a pile of anecdotes, that many assiduously researched biographies fall short. That failing makes readers, when left unsatisfied by bulky digests of information that seem inadequately synthesized and illuminated, long for a glimpse of the outtakes or the raw materials that they’d like to recompose, by means of their own imaginations and sympathies, into a fuller, more vital, and, in any case, more personal view.

I understand Macy’s desire to get her hands on anecdotes that are “each one a pearl.” Given the fact that Salinger frequented a literary crowd, it’s likely that the stories they’d deliver would have, on their own, literary merit. (And, in the case of Salinger, an autobiographical artist whose art didn’t catch up with the events of his later years, anecdote suggests the raw material not just of the biographer but of the artist himself, of the artist’s potential and unrealized projects.) But it usually takes a biographer’s work to make such pearls yield up their full lustre, and a biographer’s array of materials to craft an appropriate setting in which to draw the gems meaningfully together.